Week 2 Collecting and organising data

Introduction

In Week 1 you were introduced to the data handling cycle, also known as the PCAI cycle, and some of the elements that should be considered at the first stage of a statistical investigation, the ‘Pose’ stage. This week you are going to move onto the second stage, ‘Collect’.

When data is collected from a population, it is rare that a data value from every possible person or specimen has been collected. Before starting this week, perhaps you could reflect why this might be; you can then return to this reflection at the end of this week.

It is usual to work with a small portion of the data, known as a sample. In the first section of this week, you will look at methods of choosing samples of data.

The type of data collected will be important in informing your analyses and interpretations in the later stages of the modelling process. In the second section this week, you will look at different data types and then, in the third section, you will learn how to organise your data in a useful format.